The “Bookless” Library

Libraries have served as inspiration and classroom to many. Take author Ray Bradbury, for example. He told Sam Weller in Listen to the Echoes,

“I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library … it’s like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there’s so much to look at and read… I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt … I discovered that the library is the real school.”

But Bradbury’s vision of the transportive, book-encrusted library may become a thing of the past: North Carolina State University will soon open Hunt Library, to the applause of many – it is clean, modern, full of open spaces… but devoid of books.

Time and Ploughshares LiteraryMagazine compare it to an Apple store. A quick tour via the library’s YouTube video displays bright rooms, full of crayon-toned colors and vaulted ceilings. There are more than 80 types of chairs in the library (from classic wooden models to poppy-red bubble chairs), but only a few sparsely placed bookshelves.

Instead, books are transported from hidden archives through a mechanized procedure called “bookBot.” This system, according to the library, frees space for “collaborative work.” The library features a “Game Lab” with a 21-foot-wide screen and 270-degree projectors. “No other students in the state will have access to as much technology as they’ve had access to here in the Hunt Library,” boasts the digital library’s Associate Director, Kristen Antelman.

It is important to note the Hunt Library is only one of NC State’s libraries, and is specifically dedicated to the school’s engineering campus. The university does have a more traditional library. Yet many are heralding the Hunt Library as the “library of the future,” and other institutions are quickly following suit.

“BiblioTech,” Bexar County’s new public library, will open in the fall – and it too will be completely “bookless.” Instead, it will have 50 computer stations, 150 e-readers, 25 laptops, and 25 tablets.

“We all know the world is changing. I am an avid book reader. I read hardcover books, I have a collection of 1,000 first editions. Books are important to me,” Bexar County’s Judge NelsonWolff told ABC News. “But the world is changing and this is the best, most effective way to bring services to our community.”

According to a Pew poll released on Wednesday, however, American 16 to 29-year-olds actually enjoy traditional libraries, and use them. They are “just as likely as older adults to visit the library, and once there they borrow print books and browse the shelves at similar rates … relatively few think that libraries should automate most library services, move most services online, or move print books out of public areas.”

After spending 17 years photographing libraries across America, professor and photographer Robert Dawson said in 2011,

“The modern American public library is reading room, book lender, video rental outlet, internet café, town hall, concert venue, youth activity center, research archive, history museum, art gallery, homeless day shelter, office suite, coffeeshop, seniors’ clubhouse and romantic hideaway rolled into one. In small towns of the American West, it is also the post office and the backdrop of the local gun range. These are functions that the digital public libraries of the future will never be able to recreate.”

Books – in a few basic forms and in all their unadulterated goodness – have entranced readers for thousands of years. In their focus on “innovation,” NC State and BiblioTech are shutting out riches of the past within steel shelves and pixels. They have made way for more chairs and “open spaces,” but have boxed up classic pastimes like browsing bookshelves and hunting old, worn treasures (not to mention the unmistakable “book smell”). They have, at least in a physical sense, lost the quintessential definition of the word “library” (hint: it’s derived from the Latin word liber, or “book”).

North Carolina’s Governor Jim Hunt, namesake of the new Hunt Library, told its architect that the library was “for people who are not yet born… who will be influenced in a positive way by the development of this structure.”

While the library may influence budding scientists and architects, one hopes the little Bradburys of the future won’t get lost in the shuffle.

MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR

Hide 19 comments

19 Responses to The “Bookless” Library

If I read this right, the library will have books — but not on shelves. What will be missing is the experience of finding something utterly unlooked for, as you scan the shelves.

The modern public library accomplishes the same end, at a much lower cost, by simply restricting its open times to about four hours a day. I can reserve a book online and pick it up during the open hours, but there’s very little opportunity to browse.

I know that in my city library usage has gone up, and I believe this is true nationally, and it is hardly just attributable to folks using computers. Heck, as video stores close, people are turning to the libraries to check-out DVD’s and CD’s (the Luddites!).

As an academic librarian at a major American university, I just chuckle when this topic comes up outside of ALA listservs and the Chronicle of Higher Education. A few points worth considering as we pile upon the fainting couches over the demise of print books:

1. The push to run colleges and universities (or any public institution) more like (the 20th Century concept of) businesses has made this transition not only necessary but wildly attractive. Let me know when your office goes back to piles of paper and hand-written memos. Electronic content is cheaper (both to produce and to preserve), easier to index and therefore search, and (without artificial restrictions created by copyright holders) available to multiple users at the same time.

2. There remains many, many academic fields for which print content is still the standard and will be for the foreseeable future (I’m looking at you arts and humanities). Engineering, business, and certain other STEM fields have latched onto electronic content because these fields have been using electronic devices since their inception. I’m not familiar with the NCSU case, but I would guess the College of Engineering had a major say in this transition (in our case, it was the wishes of our highly-rated Business College to eliminate the print collection from its campus in favor of expanded collaborative space and added PCs).

3. It’s worth keeping in mind that the vast majority of an academic library’s collection is scholarly journals. I find people get misty-eyed over the idea of never being able to read Alice in Wonderland via hardcover while sitting under a shade tree, but the electronic conversion that NCSU and others are undertaking is roughly 95% journals, the contents of which are much more accessible to users via electronic searching/indexing than through binding and shelving volumes based on publication date. If they are killing traditional browsing, it’s because traditional browsing was a huge waste of time for most scholarly pursuits.

4. At least you can rejoice in the knowledge that print still has a massive stranglehold in one area of higher education: undergraduate textbooks.

They have, at least in a physical sense, lost the quintessential definition of the word “library” (hint: it’s derived from the Latin word liber, or “book”).

Sorry to quibble, but liber does not mean book in our sense, at least not originally. The earliest meaning of the word is a reference to the inner bark peeled from a tree. One would write on this bark, which was later replaced by papyrus and parchment as a scroll while retaining the term liber. As a reading technology, therefore, liber refers to a scroll, a rather limited and inconvenient technology especially for careful study, and a library to a building holding scrolls. When the codex came along (a word originally referring to a wood-block, i.e. the covers in which the pages were bound) the term liber was easily transferred to it. Still, that it was a distinct, new, and more convenient technology was readily recognized as may be seen in this Epigram of Martial (I.2):

In spite of this technological development, and in spite of the awkward fact that one may easily fit many libri into a single codex, the term liber came to refer also to our notion of a book. Meanwhile, a library became a place that can hold both scrolls and codices.

If, therefore, one were to argue that there was something essential about a library based upon its etymology, he would be hard pressed to show it is the presence of codices. Indeed, on these grounds, now that we have new reading technologies (computers and e-readers), there is little reason not to term these books as well, and the place that holds them a library.

Even so, I think the codex holds its own for serious work. Random access is much easier, if nothing else. I had a professor who used to say that computer interfaces are essentially scrolls and we largely abandoned those for a reason. I think she may have been onto something.

Snopup has it right, from the perspective of those of us inside the profession.

I’ll add: There’s a distinction that should be made between the changes that are occurring in library content (i.e. e-books and electronic journals vs. print materials), and the changes that are occurring in library space (i.e. study areas and reading rooms vs. shelves and stacks).

The Hunt Library is mostly an example of the latter, but this article confuses this with the former. It isn’t a “bookless library” in the sense of not providing access to books. What’s really happening is a move from the open-stack system used by most libraries to a closed-stack system used in places like the Bodleian library. This is being done to open up space for other uses: group study, technological installations, and high-utility flexible spaces.

Think what you will of this change, it’s quite different from the issue of whether students have access to books or choose to use them.

“No other students in the state will have access to as much technology as they’ve had access to here in the Hunt Library,” Is the kind of clunky sentence that comes from someone who values committee meeting rooms over books.

“The modern American public library is reading room, book lender, video rental outlet, internet café, town hall, concert venue, youth activity center, research archive, history museum, art gallery, homeless day shelter, office suite, coffeeshop, seniors’ clubhouse and romantic hideaway rolled into one. In small towns of the American West, it is also the post office and the backdrop of the local gun range. These are functions that the digital public libraries of the future will never be able to recreate.”

Actually, that is when libraries died. When you also, among other things, no longer could hear yourself think.

In fact, e-books acquired by academic libraries are generally as expensive or more expensive than print books. Also, e-books are marketed for libraries coded as ‘single-user only’ or ‘multiple-user,’ and the ‘multiple-user’ items – that is, the ones that can be accessed by more than one user simultaneously – are usually far more expensive, when they’re available at all. The split between materials that are currently collected as print copies rather than as electronic resources doesn’t divide neatly between the humanities and sciences. As for academic journals, cataloging/indexing issues have not yet been widely simplified by the advent of electronic materials, because there isn’t consistent practice. As always, the devil is in the details. A lot remains to be sorted out with the new technology; it’s not a smooth transition, and that fact itself accounts for some of the current displeasure of library users, which library administrators and technicians tend to get rankled over as they pursue exciting new vistas of “innovation.”

But let’s remember as well that changes are ongoing, and are indeed going to take us to new places. The most basic boon for both public and academic libraries that’s come with electronic resources is in space-saving. But if this switch from print to ‘e’ becomes as massive as a lot of people (including some librarians) smugly expect, after awhile the question is sure to arise: if we no longer really need local resources (electronic materials coming through the internet from anywhere to anywhere), why do we need a local institution? The authorities who put up the money may well decide they can do better by contracting a package deal with an online vendor to provide materials directly to internet users, and thus physical libraries, library staffs and the profession of librarianship may become all but obsolete. Though they’ll still have a website to maintain, I suppose, and there might be expanded employment opportunities with the vendor companies.

As for public library systems in the present day, another change that’s come to those in my town is that, in following a “business model,” they’re discarding materials that don’t circulate at a rate far beyond what they did in recent decades, and they’re inclined to purchase more copies (print or ‘e’) of best-selling titles (and then discard multiple copies as a title’s popularity wanes), instead of spending money on, say, small-press publications that won’t ever circulate much. That is, they’re trying to function as a bookstore, pretending that circulation ‘stats’ represent profits. So, if you want some old title that’s not too popular that your public library used to have, you might be able to buy a discarded copy from Better World Books via the internet, or maybe an e-book if a text is available that way (and despite the hype, at this point they’re often not). However, many of us private folks have space-limitation problems of our own in our households. That used to be a nice thing about public libraries, they kept materials for you so that you didn’t have to buy and store them, but apparently they don’t consider that to be their “mission” anymore, unless you’re a big Stephen King fan, or looking for ‘The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Perfect Wedding.’

No one, as far as I noticed, has brought up what worries me most about this development: its sheer fragility.

Libraries are now abandoning themselves, as never before in history, both to a plentiful supply of electric power (on their own part and their clients) and to the continuing integrity and freedom of the Internet. In the context of the history of civilization, we’ve apparently come in the mere blink of an eye to take for granted that we’ll always have these as good as we have them for the moment. This is folly. When the lights go out, or if censorship by rulers once more became the order of the day, they all could disappear in another blink of an eye. Kindle batteries having gone dead mere hours later, readers who have fecklessly trashed their own physical reading matter will come thronging nto libraries– those institutions who should be its especial custodians– and find nothing there to help them, either. I dunno, the last time a series of disasters eventually left those in a once brilliant empire with nothing to read, a long dark age ensued. It abated thanks partly to a few monks in obsure places who quietly managed to preserve crucial manuscripts over centuries until the content could once more be disseminated. If our own actions ensure that not even these will exist the next time around, the prognosis could be black indeed.

We could add that paperless operation of government and corporations, for all its virtues and conveniences, is already making the task of historians difficult.

I know that this is about a larger subject, but I am a student at NC state and I use the library. There are books, but you type it in on a touchscreen and the bookbot gets it for you. Most people use the library at NC state for studying in between classes, socializing, computer access, and printing; not reading fiction books. In fact those are at another library. The D.H. Library was the library students used before this library was built was overcrowded. The learning commons was where all the computers were and they were always taking, a group of about 20 people would be using the one big screen to play video games, there would be a line of people waiting to use the printer, and groups trying to study with a rolling whiteboard with everything going on. The Hunt library was built to address those needs, the whole thing is like a learning commons, because that’s how most students use the library. There are conference rooms with projectors, an enclosed gaming room, study rooms to reserve, plenty of computers,and areas just to work or study. Plus a cafe downstairs (my favorite is a Literary Latte). It wasn’t built to replace books or just for the sake of being advanced, it was built because it was needed. (the big twisty screen that goes up 5 stories with words streaming down is a bit much though).-GO PACK!